REPLAY: Andrea Bajani on the Mysteries of Death and the Search for Renewal

April 5, 2026·1 hr 26 min·5 clips

At 25, Bajani spent 36 sleepless hours at his grandmother's funeral in Rome and came home to write two pages in a completely different voice — the first time life had forced him to look it in the eye.

1. Otherppl with Brad Listi presents a replay of episode 702, originally aired April 21, 2021, featuring Italian novelist Andrea Bajani discussing his novel 'If You Kept a Record of Sins.' 2. Host Brad Listi introduces himself from Los Angeles and calls 'If You Kept a Record of Sins' one of his top ten reading experiences of the century; the book was published in the US by Archipelago Books in a translation by Elizabeth Harris. 3. The episode's central question is: how does a novelist move from clever, performative writing to writing that confronts life and death directly? 4. Bajani describes the origin in his grandmother's death in Rome in 2001, when he was 25 and still writing comic, brilliant prose designed to demonstrate his intelligence. 5. He traveled by train from the Alps to Rome for the funeral — one day, no overnight, last train home that night — spending 36 sleepless hours with what he describes as an Italian dysfunctional family amplified to its maximum by grief. 6. After returning, he wrote two or three pages addressed directly to his grandmother in a voice that had no cleverness, no performance: 'Life hit me and said, if you want to write about me, you have to look into my eyes. It's not a carnival.' 7. Those two pages stayed with him for five to six years while he searched for the story — using the Cinderella metaphor: he had the shoe (the emotional core) and was looking for the foot (the story) to fit it. 8. The story grew like 'leaves around a tree' without his conscious direction: the grandmother became a mother; a mystery about someone disappearing emerged; a separate research thread about Italian entrepreneurs going to post-Soviet Romania surfaced. 9. After years of notebooks and research trips between Italy and Romania, the two stories fused, and Bajani wrote the novel in seven months. 10. The novel centers on Lorenzo, who narrates to his dead mother Lula in second person — not a letter, but an address — because a son never fully internalizes that his mother is a separate 'you' rather than part of himself. 11. Lula abandoned Lorenzo and his stepfather to go to Romania, where she tried to build a business selling a weight-loss egg — a device where customers sit inside a large egg-shaped structure. 12. Bajani describes the two halves of the novel: a past strand where Lula and young Lorenzo live on what he calls a warm, playful island, and a present strand where Lorenzo, in Romania for Lula's funeral, assembles clues about who she became. 13. Brad Listi notes that maternal abandonment is statistically rarer than paternal abandonment, and found the novel extra heartbreaking for that reason; he also says he felt sympathy for Lula as a human being despite her choice. 14. Bajani says Lula is a genius of sorts — her naive capitalism is both ridiculous and moving — but she couldn't succeed because she wasn't mean; she went into the jungle 'with a couple of flowers and an egg.' 15. The novel's title comes from the phrase 'if you kept a record of sins' — implying nobody is without fault, and that keeping score destroys the possibility of salvation; Bajani says he writes not to judge but to find the 'portion of humanity' in every character. 16. The conversation turns to Italian capitalism: Italy became a capitalist country only in the 1960s, converting suddenly from a farming economy, and this rapid conversion produced a kind of collective shock — people not sure they made the right choice, trying to export a system they hadn't fully absorbed. 17. Listi compares this to an American's discomfort at capitalism being presented as a 'terminus,' a finish line; Bajani says equilibrium between communal and capitalistic impulses is achievable only for two or three seconds before it collapses — that's nature. 18. Bajani describes his research method: traveling to Romania not to take notes on five cars at the airport, but because writing with his body through a place changes who he is; if the person who finishes the novel is the same as the person who started it, he considers the book a failure. 19. The interview has the easy, digressive warmth of two readers who both loved the same book — Listi asks the follow-up question, Bajani loops back to the novel's emotional logic, and neither rushes toward conclusions. 20. Listeners who are interested in Italian literary fiction, the craft of incubating difficult material over years, or the intersection of European post-war history with a son's search for his mother's mystery will find this conversation rewarding; those seeking plot summary or nonfiction analysis will not.

As heard by us

A mistaken image leads into a patient, exact literary conversation.

Brad Listi’s replay with Andrea Bajani is a literate, low-key conversation about how a novel can begin with a mistaken image and then have to earn its own shape. Bajani talks through If You Kept a Record of Sins, the U.S.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a patient replay of Brad Listie's conversation with Andrea Bayani, episode 702, first aired on April 21, 2021.

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